Victorian College of the Arts - Theses
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ItemComposing Cultural Reclamation — Reconnecting to an Indigenous Cultural Heritage through a Music Practice( 2021)This thesis is a first-person account detailing my reclamation of my First Nations Australian cultural heritage through my creative practice. To understand the project, it is pertinent to first understand two important aspects of my identity: 1. I am a First Nations Jaadwa man, raised disconnected to culture as a result of colonisation. I did not always know this, but it has always been true. 2. I am a musician, engaged with composition and performance practices since I was a teenager. As a result, music and sound is an embedded part of my identity. The aim of the research is to understand my Jaadwa heritage, and to realise this through my music practice. That practice consists of two creative outputs, the first of which consists of five long-form, improvised soundscape works which I call ‘Country-songs’ in consideration of their existing in the intersection of music and Australian Indigenous understandings of Country. These works aim to develop my relationship to my cultural Jaadwa Country, and to consider my place on Boon Wurrung Country, where I was born and continue to reside. The second output of my practice consists of six lyric-centred songs in the style of folk and country & western music, in which I share narratives of my experience as a Jaadwa man disconnected from, and reconnecting to culture. Composing and performing these songs allowed me to generate a space in which I can reflect on my ancestors, family, identity, and my social and political responsibilities in the context of cultural expression. The research is embedded in four primary fields: Western understandings and creative expressions of soundscapes; sonic expression within Indigenous communities; histories of the relationship between Indigenous communities and developing sound technologies; and, Indigenous identity and reclamation through creative practice. The discussions I share around my creative works stem from, intertwine, and further these fields. My understandings of these fields, experiences during periods of field-work, and development of the creative works all contribute to an emergent conception of my Indigenous cultural heritage and its expression through composition. The research consists of a written thesis, and digital audio recordings of the five ‘Country-songs’ and six lyrical songs, totalling approximately 45 minutes of audio. Together, the written thesis and the audio works document my observed changes in self, and positions my creative output as a space through which I realise and reflect these changes.